(crowd applauding)

Alright, so Stripe is an extraordinary company.

You have two products that many people know.

One is Payments Processing,

so if you're a startup, you don't want to handle,

you don't want to worry about banks,

you don't want to worry about the law,

you don't want to worry about that stuff,

you just offload it to Stripe.

Put in a couple lines of code, offloads it to Stripe.

They also launched recently,

more like six months ago,

nine months ago?

A bit more, but it's only now,

I think, starting to garner the justified appreciation.

So they launched a product called Stripe Atlas,

and that solves a different problem,

which is if you want to incorporate an entire company,

they will do it for you.

And they'll do it in Delaware,

and they will set you up with a bank account.

They'll do everything for you.

In fact, 20% of all new technology companies

are through Stripe Atlas, which is extraordinary.

So very cool company, just valued at 20 billion dollars,

not a joke.

Alright, so my first question.

So when Stripe started and you read about it,

it was always about start-ups

and not just about start-ups,

it was about kind of open source, like idealistic start-ups,

it seemed like.

But then you also started doing payments

for like Amazon, Facebook, Apple,

and now you do payments for offline companies.

And so, my question for you is

is Stripe changing the way capitalism works

or is Stripe just enabling the capitalism that we have now

but making it slightly more efficient in every way?

Well, that's a big question to start with.

I know, it's the first question of the weekend, man.

So it's great to be--

And this guy's really smart, by the way.

You should read his blog.

He not just runs a good company,

he's like really, really smart and reads lots of good books.

Okay, back to regularly scheduled programming.

Fake news is a pervasive problem throughout the media.

It's great to be here.

Wired has been,

since I was just a very small bit, older than five,

a sort of a symbol of technology,

optimism and hope for me.

I was reading Louis' piece in the 25th anniversary issue

on a trip last week,

and I loved his sort of articulation

of situating Wired in the culture,

kind of when Wired started out was being kind of accused

of this Panglossian optimism

and sort of the need now in this kind of environment

of sort of growing pessimism

for a kind of militant optimism.

So three cheers for that.

But to your question.

I always liked Deirdre McCloskey, the economist,

Deirdre McCloskey's kind of rejection of

sort of the notion of capitalism

or rather the fixation in the description of,

or in the word capitalism, I guess,

the fixation on capital.

In her terms, capitalism represents a kind of

mistake in nomenclature,

and that actually the core of capitalism

is opportunity.

This is what changed in the 18th century

or whenever we sort of set the t equals zero

for this crazy exponential takeoff we've had.

But change then is not something that our capital markets

or the availability of capital or whatever,

but rather, in her terms, a novel liberalism of inclusion,

a novel liberalism of inclusion.

And so, I think Stripe is a kind of

digital online version of that,

where what we're trying to do is to sort of

build economic infrastructure for the Internet

and to sort of try to create opportunities

for people to build products, implement business models,

expand globally to sort of take something

that they can build in their bedroom

and sort of deploy it at full planetary scale

and importantly kind of do so

in such a way that the most important tools

and the most sophisticated advanced functionality

is available not only to the biggest companies in the world

but only to kinda literally two people starting out

in their bedroom.

You mentioned some of the really large companies

that use Stripe.

What I love about their use of Stripe

is that in almost every case,

they're not using the,

we're not executing the sort of

traditional enterprise playbook,

whereby, unless you're kind of doing millions of dollars,

you want to pay us millions of dollars a year,

we won't talk to you.

They're using the same version of Stripe

that an Atlas founder in Nigeria just starting out

can take advantage of.

And so, internally, as we kind of articulate

Stripe's long term goals, one of the,

the third one in fact is that we try to be

an anti-incumbency force.

We want to kind of reduce activation energy barriers.

We want to make incumbency less of a competitive advantage.

And so, kind of to your question as to

how Stripe is kind of affecting the overall ecosystem here,

I want to caveat with,

I'll leave it to others to decide

to what degree we are overall.

We're still a small company in the scheme of things.

However, our goal is to the extent

that we're having some impact,

that yeah, we're kind of making large companies

able to operate more effectively

and to do more and all the rest,

but that on net, we're arming the upstarts.

The anti-incumbency bias, super interesting point.

And I understand that.

You do help the incumbents,

but you help them with the same code

that you help the Egyptian startups.

Understand that argument.

How far would you take this though?

Stripe's getting pretty big.

You're taking an ever larger portion of the payment space.

When do you become a dominant incumbent,

and when you reach that position,

do you worry about the effect you'll have on the economy?

We have a monopolist-centered tech economy.

You're gonna become one of those

at your current trajectory.

What will you do when you become a giant monopolist?

Well-- (audience laughs)

there's a long way to go

before top of our list of concerns is our excessive size.

But let's thought experiment.

What would you do?

Because none of the people who've reached that point

have given it up.

So three points.

First, part of the reason we have

Stripe being an anti-incumbency force

as being kind of one of our explicit,

written down long term goals

is so that we're kind of bound to it.

And so, we can't decide if and when we become

some much larger pillar of the internet economy,

that actually hey, those upstarts aren't so great after all,

let's just sort of help the cozy club,

the entities which prevail around us in that moment.

So first.

Second is I think that

I'm not sure this narrative of tech monopoly is true.

I don't want to say that it's completely untrue,

but if you look at it just kind of

a sort of tech market cap concentration,

the tech industry does not appear to be more concentrated

today than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago.

If you just look at it over time,

it's been sort of, it's been fairly consistent.

There's certain verticals that get more concentrated,

but there's so many more verticals,

the total amount of concentration.

Not even that.

If you just look kind of at S&P 500,

a percentage of the technology sector

occupied by the top four technology companies,

that does not seem to be more concentrated

than it was in the past.

However, there is something, I think,

important going on here,

which is economy-wide, we are definitely seeing

much more concentration.

And so, there're kind of various studies around this,

but you just take the median industry,

the median industry by either market cap or by revenue,

is to getting more concentrated,

and anecdotally, we kinda see this.

30 years ago, there were many airlines,

now there's only a very small handful.

30 years ago, there were many banks,

now there's only a very small handful.

You look at it globally.

Semiconductors, 30 years ago, many different kinds of

semiconductor companies, and now there really are only

three meaningful,

not just in the US, but they're on a global basis.

And so, I almost wonder if we have the narrative backwards,

where, and again, I don't want to kinda be dismissive

of some of the kind of important questions that exist

around technology companies,

but to me it almost looks like

the tech industry is not more monopolistic

than it has been in the past.

However, every other sector is certainly

getting more concentrated.

And then you have those kind of nuanced questions around,

well, should we be looking at kind of

sort of revenue concentration

or should we be looking at monopoly pricing?

And obviously with regard to the tech trends in particular,

that's kind of a subtle question

because on the one hand, they're doing a lot,

but then on the other hand,

they're not charging a lot.

And so I think its-- Facebook is very

inexpensive to use, unless you value your privacy.

There you go, right, right, right.

So I'll pause there.

Okay.

Let me go back

and I want to ask you one of the questions about

what got us to this point.

So you've spoken eloquently in previous interviews,

and you have said, there were decisions made

in the past 25 years about global Internet architecture

which were good,

and those were a lot of decisions that were made,

Mac, in 1993, in the period shortly thereafter.

And then there were a bunch of decisions

made about global Internet architecture which were bad

and led to some of the problems we have today.

Explain some of the decisions that were bad,

and explain how we can make better decisions

in the next quarter century.

(Patrick laughing)

That's easy.

Yeah, I was gonna say, right, right.

Yes or no, Patrick,

yes or no. Just keep it going,

keep it going with the softballs.

So okay, I think, whatever I was rambling about before,

I think probably was getting at was

I always found it very,

as a general matter, one of the most amazing

kind of intellectual exercises of the past 50 years

is the kind of, the overall architecture of the Internet

and not just that which happened

around the creation of the web and HTML and all the rest,

but that which preceded us in TCP

and this sort of ethernet

and the core protocols and everything else.

And to your point, they were sort of

carefully thought through,

and the kind of scale and variance and all the rest

is really so amazing.

And it's just so phenomenal,

that sort of Jeff Dean at Google talks about how

any technology you invent that sort of grows

by more than two orders of magnitude,

you generally have to kind of re-architect from scratch.

Jeff Dean at Google is the guy who creates

MapReduce and Bigtable and a whole bunch of their other

coolest technologies.

What's amazing about the Internet is like,

these guys invented it in late 60s, 70s, 80s and so on,

and it's grown by sort of

a dozen orders of magnitude

and we haven't had to rebuild the core technologies.

Okay, what's bad?

So, speaking our own narrow solopsistic book,

I mean payments are bad.

Maybe that's good or bad from our standpoint.

It certainly yields an opportunity for us,

but you know it is very funny to go back,

and look at the early error codes

in the HTTP specification.

Where there is this kind of,

the 404, we're all familiar with

and then there's 402 the Payment Required error code.

And it's there in the spec to be implemented.

For such a core piece of functionality of the internet,

it does seem kind of funny/tragic that

so many decades into the web's history,

and given the central importance

of being able to generate a sustaining income

from the Internet that it has gone so undone,

and underbuilt.

There's lots of other aspects as well,

where I think.

I mean,

Alan K. talks about how remarkable a culture,

and how singular the group was that invented many

of the core protocols of the Internet.

The folks at Park, and the way in which they were inspired

by the Rad Lab at MIT and all the rest,

and just this amazing cornucopia,

excuse me Cambrian Explosion of innovation.

So I guess the question I find myself thinking about,

and wondering is, well, was there a particular ethos,

and culture, and set of connections in individuals,

and set of mentors and inspiration they had

that really served us well in, say, the 25 years before '93.

Has some of that been lost now, and to that's been lost,

how do we regain it?

Let me dig in to one subset of that,

so you're talking about four payments early on.

One of my favorite facts about Stripe,

is that the way they raised money is they went to

the Founders of PayPal and were like,

Payments are broken, give us money!

And they got it, which is extraordinary.

If payments had worked better in the early Internet,

is there an alternative history whereby the most important

companies that were to develop decided

to make their revenue on selling things?

Whether subscriptions or something else,

as opposed to advertising.

'Cause that's like one of the foundational decisions

that leads to the Attention Economy.

Yes.

It was funny trying to raise money from the PayPal people,

in that, I remember reflecting after my first meeting

with Peter Thiel, and I was cycling back

from the protidio, and being like

Shit, you know it probably wasn't such a good idea

to tell him that PayPal was terrible.

(Nicholas laughing)

But Peter was such a contrarian thinker,

that he told me years later that he didn't think PayPal

was terrible, but he thought he was probably too biased

to think that PayPal was good.

So the fact that I was making this other argument,

he thought was a reason he should invest in Stripe.

I don't quite know how all the logic works,

but we benefited from it so, won't complain.

When we started Stripe this was part of our thesis,

on the margins there was more advertising

than there would be if payments worked well.

Many things were using ads, because ads were easy.

Payments were hard.

You could shift the balance in the other direction.

That was kind of a hypothesis within,

oh kind of clear counterfactual,

back when we were starting Stripe.

Now as the Chinese Internet has burgeoned,

it's actually become much more clear

that this is indeed the case.

At least in as much as you believe that

Chinese consumer preferences are representative

of American consumer preferences.

For example in the podcast base, we're all familiar

with the services that we know and love from listening

to our favorite podcasts, and hearing their endorsements

every 10 or 15 minutes.

But in China the prevailing monetization mechanism for

podcasts is payments.

It's totally different, it's kind of the same product but

monetized fundamentally differently.

And incidentally the Chinese podcast economy appears

to be quite a bit more lucrative.

You know there's other stuff you have to normalize for,

what are they competing against and so on,

but as a general matter it seems to be working

very well there.

So, yes, in short I would say I agree.

Great

(audience laughing)

But

I love-

But I'm biased, look.

Alright last question since we're almost out of time,

Wired started in these offices, because Silicon Valley

was blown up around these offices,

or I think we moved here in 1994.

Stripe is right around the corner.

You're enabling entrepreneurs all over the world,

is Silicon Valley still going to be like this in 25 years?

Is it still going to be so dominant, or will we have

finally dispersed?

I think that the returns of agglomeration

are very high, right?

Romer just won the Nobel Prize, and he's obviously

one of the foremost scholars of this,

so I think absent self sabotage,

I think Silicon Valley should, I don't mean normally should,

but absent self sabotage Silicon Valley probably would

remain substantially preeminent,

and obviously has had remarkable durability

since the '30s, or since Fairchild, or whatever.

However, we do seem to be engaged in this, kind of...

I of course don't think that anybody is deliberately

sabotaging Silicon Valley, but there is an emergent

self sabotage that is occurring

in the form of a trifecta maybe,

of land prices, and housing costs and so on.

Second which is kind of a domestic mobility restriction,

it's becoming ever harder for people who aren't benefiting

from the opportunities in Silicon Valley to come here,

and to do so.

There is an international mobility barrier,

in the form of immigration laws and rules,

which you know they've always been bad,

but or at least they've never been great,

and the margins are maybe getting slightly worse,

but there's certainly a kind of significant impediment.

Certainly as other countries advance and develop their own

ecosystems the comparative advantage to the US

is diminishing.

Thirdly a kind of cultural,

well I was going to say degradation.

I won't say degradation, a cultural change.

Others can decide whether it's for good or ill,

but I was just talking to Louis and he was just saying

how today in Silicon Valley those who are positive,

those who are optimistic, they are now the revolutionaries,

and the counter culture.

That's a remarkable statement, we're supposed to be the

epicenter of innovation in the world.

It is now the case that there is such a prevailing kind of

mood and weather of cynicism and pessimism,

and um negativity,

that I think it does in fact substantially,

challenge our fundamental role,

and more importantly

our fundamental opportunity.

I think it's so easy sitting here...

San Francisco is rarely accused of being a representative

example of what it's like to exist in some random place

in the world.

San Francisco is not normal, and I think in many ways

that's good, but the downside is that since Wired

was founded the size of the global middle class has tripled.

Now more than half the world's population is in the

middle class, and everyone here is familiar I'm sure

with the endless statistics

about how things are getting better,

and yet somehow that is not

internalized in our mood.

The mood is somehow that things are getting worse,

and I think a central question for the next 25 years

is where does that mood go?

Because ideology and symbolism and aspirations

really matter.

Alright well my mood is better

having listened to this man for 20 minutes.

(audience laughing and applauding)

So thank you very much Patrick Collison,

thank you for coming on stage.

Thank you.